History and aesthetic of computer animation and virtual reality. Notes on Los Angeles in the 1980s and the computer animation community of that time. Miscellaneous commentary on the archaeology of the cold war, as well as notes on the esoteric knowledge as it manifests in popular culture, cinematic theory, the hollow earth, espionage, corruption in civic governance, the aesthetics of conspiracy theories, the failure of the cultural myth and other related topics.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

The New Sport of Reading Crazy Internet Comments

[Revised 12/31/2012 to add details about the comments]

There is a new sport in town, a new
dance craze if you will, everybody can enjoy it. The sport is
reading the comments of the biped mammals to a topical news article.
For every rational response, there is at least one irrational one,
or so it seems. Topics that set them off include Radiation and Nuclear Power, 911, Obama, Climate Change and Global Warming, and the Economy.

The irrational comments fall into a number
of categories, they represent a broad diversity of insanity. It would
not be fair to characterize it all as right wing ranting because
there is, depending on the topic, a certain amount of left wing
insanity as well. It depends on the topic.

In this case, the topic is a lawsuit
filed by crewmen of the USS Reagan who participated in the
humanitarian efforts during the nuclear meltdown in Japan. They are
claiming that the Tokyo Power company deliberately lied about the
level of radiation exposure and caused the plaintiffs unnecessary
harm.

Go to the bottom of the article, there
will be a few comments, and click on "load more comments".
Keep clicking until you have had enough.

Here is a summary of some of the comments:

-- first someone makes a joke about how nuclear power is really safe -- then, out of the blue, someone says that in fact there was coup d'etat and Obama had not won the election and that therefore all news that you read must be faked and furthermore that they are doing it with our tax dollars ! (To add insult to injury, I guess). -- then someone says that we have to be careful because we have all been exposed to the Japanese radiation and we are all going to die -- then someone tries to explain that the radiation out here in n. america from the meltdown in Japan was minor -- but then someone says that no artificial radiation (e.g. nuclear reactor) is minor, its different from other types of radiation that occurs in nature -- then while these people are fighting, we get another topic about how it serves those sailors right because we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima, and its exactly the same thing, and besides we were guilty of a war crime because the Japanese were going to surrender and Americans just wanted to kill people -- then people try to explain what happened in WW2 and why it was not the same thing at all, but but the other conversations are all ongoing, except for the Obama "coup d'etat" one that was SO CRAZY and off topic that no one even replies to it. -- And so forth.

I have not yet read a convincing
explanation of this phenomenon (the phenomenon of crazy comments, not the question of why blogger can not write a text editor). Are we simply noticing this more
because the Internet and the format of comments to news articles
exposes us to the types of beliefs that were always there, just not
so easily seen? Or are we seeing an explosion of new forms of
irrational beliefs because of the times we live in, or other causes?

I am pretty sure that this phenomena is one of the characteristics of the age we live in. For better or worse, people will look back to our period and note this about us.

My intuition tells me that while a
certain amount of these crazy opinions always exists (or has existed), that we are a very polarized
society and that there is an unpleasant amount of irrational thinking
as a result of decades of deliberate lies of political groups. Not
unlike what we find in Pakistan, by the way, although the details of what they are being irrational about are different.

I will post links to other comment repositories of nuttyness as I come across them. I have already lost track of some great Global Warming exchanges though lack of diligence.